Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Slightly over a week ago, in my February 1st entry, I observed that it is possible now to make a record simply by recombining fragments of sounds sampled by other records—you don’t even need to know how to play an instrument. In the context of that argument, I cited Public Enemy’s Hank Shocklee, who said almost twenty years ago:

We don’t like musicians. We don’t respect musicians…. In dealing with rap, you have to be innocent and ignorant of music. Trained musicians are not ignorant of music, and they cannot be innocent to it. They understand it, and that’s what keeps them from dealing with things out of the ordinary…. [Public Enemy is] a musician’s nightmare. (Keyboard, September 1990, pp. 82-83).

Perhaps instead of citing Hank Shocklee, however, I should have simply included the following commercial advertisement for Microsoft’s Songsmith as proof enough of my claim. Clicking on the link also brings up on the sidebar examples of what is fast becoming a new cottage industry, twisted versions of pop songs (re)made with Microsoft’s Songsmith. Among the most byzantine of these new songs are versions of the Police’s “Roxanne” and Billy Idol’s “White Wedding.” Anyone yet tried "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"? In the words of Hank Shocklee, Songsmith is a musician’s nightmare, and even more evidence that rock music has received a silicon termination notice.

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What is 60x50?

60x50 is an experiment in invention and discovery, inspired by an observation made by William Stafford in Writing the Australian Crawl. The purpose of this blog is to demonstrate Stafford's insight that a writer "is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them." The date used in each blog entry is merely a prompt, a method used to open up a particular direction of research and discovery. I find this a more interesting and more amenable process than the use of newspaper "headlines" or "current events" that in effect would predetermine my subject for me.